PhDwannabe

Science is, in some senses, the union of the two philosophical traditions of more a priori logic and empiricism. Part of being a decent scientist is knowing when to add a little more of either. Is math skill in some way related to chess skill? This is an empirical question. It's flailing its arms and screaming out for an empirical answer. Psychologists don't study these sorts of questions much--maybe they're a bit too whimsical for grant money. So I don't know of much literature on it. Evidently, though, there have been studies done on the effects of chess education--as an educational intervention, importantly--on several different outcome variables. Have never read any of those studies, and can't speak to their methodological merit. Somebody with a bit more interest in the question is encouraged to dig them up and peruse.

We don't have laws? I had no idea. I'll be delighted to hear you prove this negative. Care to define/operationalize "unification?" Biology's totally not a science, by the way. Acarology Anatomy Arachnology Biochemistry Bioinformatics Biomechanics Bionomics Biophysics Biotechnology Botany Cell biology Ecology Entomology Evolution Genetics Gerontology Herpetology Histology Ichnology Ichthyology Immunology Limnology Marine biology Microbiology Molecular biology Mycology Myrmecology Neurobiology Ornithology Paleontology Palynology Parasitology Photobiology Phycology Physiology Plant physiology Biological psychology Radiobiology Sociobiology Structural biology Taxonomy Virology Zoology

Sweet Jesus, I leave for 6 little months and it degenerates into this? 1) Read my first couple of posts. I spent a lot of time on them. Mostly to procrastinate. The informative public service they provide is a valuable secondary gain. 2) Critically peruse, I don't know, an intro psych textbook for, I don't know, half an hour. 3) Stop regurgitating what you read some blogger say about some other idiot's interpretation of Thomas Szasz. Worse still, stop thinking for yourself so much. Other people have puzzled out these same issues more extensively than you've had time to. You've got to pay the bills, and all. Other people are smarter than you. Seek them out and copy their halfway-reasoned ideas. It's called an education. 4) You want to criticize something? Criticize a study. They're the bricks of science, in this one or any of the others. You might have to read one first, though. Find fault with their methodology, or implications, or treatment of the existing literature. What's that? You want to fight me about treatment efficacy? Awesome. Well, open wide, baby bird, we've got a whole barrel o' treatment efficacy research we can fight over 'til the oceans boil, and psychologists are consequently far less in demand. But, hey, guess what! We're not entitled to our own facts! (It distresses me far more than you'll ever know!) This sort of mouth-breathing, Cheetos-on-the-face, slurred pronouncement of "MAN, THEY CANT DO NOTHIN', 'CAUSE IT'S ALL UP FOR 'TERPRETATION, MAN" doesn't get us anywhere productive, or interesting, or fun. Or, I don't know, take another lick of the non sequitur toad and keep on rambling about whatever. There. En garde. I have returned. -Douglas MacArthur / Me

Ahamed: It appears that you deleted the comment I wrote on your blog there. That's pretty bad form, dude. You've taken this thread pretty far astray with a link to your blog post about the mechanism by which you suppose wet hair makes you sick. <heavy sigh> At the risk of continuing that particular offtopicness, I wanted to make sure that my comment goes down in indelible internet ink that you're not able to delete. You say that: You go on to explain that the water in one's hair, with its high heat capacity, facilitates the loss of heat from the head. If I'm remembering my poor, innocent, murdered comment well enough, I noted that the myth and misunderstanding of grave heat loss through the head has been roundly debunked many times. Furthermore, I think I said that the homeostatic mechanisms of a normal person will prevent core temperature from dropping any appreciable amount from hair wet in the shower. Your immune system will not suffer any measurable deficit from shower-wet hair. With that, I'll excuse myself, suggest that you create new threads for new topics here (as well as stop deleting peoples' comments on your blog), and we'll let these nice folks get back to figuring out why water makes hoosier sick.

How have you decided that I'm not sure there's a problem? Could you point to one of my statements that would let you know that I am inappropriately unsure that there is a problem? Also, I'd love if you could address DJBruce's comparably excellent question: I'll answer a few of your questions as well. Consider that a down payment on the wonderful answers I'm dying to hear about. There are two separate answers to this question, both of which I think are just about equally valid: 1) fMRI studies 2) the concept of mental illness need not be grounded in a "genuine, verifiable 'malfunction' of the brain." Social behavior, for instance, as a product and activity of the brain--a phenomenon which is certainly a product of that brain's activity, but not always reducible (nomologically or logically) to that activity. Well, I don't call myself a psychiatrist, nor will I ever, so I can't be too sure who those who 'like to call themselves' psychiatrists think. But maybe you should, I don't know, shot in the dark: read some psychology research and see how these vicious beasts proffer to know what a mental illness is. Maybe then we can have a rational discussion about that process. Or maybe we can just say random opinions that come to our heads about things we don't know about. I think, for instance, on one of Saturn's moons there has to be an alligator named Phil. Just swimmin' around down there! And, as a bonus, yet another question of my own: We're talking about psychology. Why are you talking about drugs?

Ahamed, I read your posts on lie detection techniques, and I didn't see any evidence whatsoever. What do you have in the way of scientific evidence to back up your many claims?

HENRY: [demonstrating with rocks] See, this is us and we’re traveling AROUNNND the sun. That’s a 1.3 million mile trip every year! You might say that each and every one of us is a crew member here on... Spaceship Earth. CAMPER: When will we say that? HENRY: Any time. Dinner. Literally any time.

Maybe not. There may be the superficial appearance of bimodality, but I'd be more impressed with that thought if there was more than one response option between the peaks, or if there were any kind of smoother approach to the peaks on any side. (Indeed, it actually appears almost trimodal, given the large peak at 5000-10000). Of course, you quickly recognized all of this, and noted: Quite right. Phrased a little differently than that way you did so, this is a variable in which, interestingly, the people taking the survey are likely to differ dramatically from the target population, since both # of posts and willingness to take the survey are driven strongly by interest & investment in the site. Nonetheless, that sort of thing really explains the difference in sample mean from the population mean more than anything else. The two peaks near the right of the graph pique (puns? really?) my interest a little more, and I don't think they're totally accounted for by what you said. I think what's going on there is actually likely to be some of what we call "anchoring." In short, "more than 1___, more than 5___, or more than 10___" are common heuristics used to guess numbers in societies with base 10 number systems. You see this sort of thing a lot in surveys where continuous variables are assessed ordinally, and the response categories have the sort of numbering system like the one you threw down. Bruce, besides hitting us with some basic descriptives, do you have any plans ("do you have enough data/power" may be the better question) to run, perhaps, a few correlations, or anything more?

HUMANS SURVIVE SPACE!

Stradi, dude, I don't have the energy to try to provide you with context. Read a couple of Freud's works, complete, let's say, an undergraduate psychology major, and talk to me in four years. Until then, enjoy all of the straw-man garbage you can handle. Umm... maybe the way chemistry or astronomy moved on from alchemy or astrology? Maybe because your hilarious black-and-white conception of "bogus"/"not-bogus" takes a big dump all over the detail and nuance of scientific progress? No. No, actually, I don't. Cognitive behaviorism, in large part. If you had any knowledge about the modern state of the discipline you complain about, you'd know that already.

As much as I want to write 5000 words on this, I'll give you the serious cliffs notes version: Race is currently widely thought in the human (biological and social) sciences to be sort of a junk construct, biologically speaking. It's often called a "social construct," which sounds sort of maddening, because you think, "umm... black people have black kids... that doesn't seem like a social construct to me." Well, that is the case. Skin color is most certainly pretty damn heritable. But here's the big question: who decided that skin color is this thing called race? Race as a construct would really only have meaning if it was a bunch of traits that hung together fairly consistently, like the traits associated with dog breeds (more or less) or other subspecies do. If skin color were really consistently associated with height, cephalic index, nose-to-face ratio, breast shape, eye color, hair color, hair type, earwax type, earlobe attachment, blood type, not to mention a million other traits that are less conveniently Mendelian, and often hidden from us... then race might be worth categorizing. Unfortunately, that sort of thing isn't borne out. There's a series of maps--I think it's in Erlich's Human Natures--that demonstrates this pretty well. Overlay a map of skin shade onto a world map of cephalic index, for even a chunk of the globe (we've forgotten about this stuff as part of "race," but you'd have heard about it a hundred years ago, when anthropometry was a little more, uhh, "in"). You'll quickly see that, although there's some correspondence in some regions, most of the iso-lines don't line up. Plenty of groups with similar skin shade have wildly different cephalic indices. More empirical data give results even more dramatic than this simple visual inspection. In short: the traits don't hang together, so the construct seems to be largely based on a single--somewhat arbitrary--trait: skin color. We could've just as easily picked cephalic index, but historically, we didn't, because skin color happens to be so visually salient. There are plenty of studies that do find correlations between traits, but often it's an issue of sampling--if they'd have sampled some remote tribe in central Russia, they'd have seen that they share a bunch of weird mutations with Moroccan Berbers and a handful of Native Americans from the Yucatan. This isn't to say that what we call "race" isn't important. As a social construct, it's extremely important. In most of the western world, we define both this person and this person as "black"--this should tell you how obsessed we are with creating simple categories for things--round holes/square pegs be damned! This categorization has, as I'm sure I don't really need to mention, massive consequences for how people are treated and experience society. From a research standpoint, race is also an important variable, but it's a proxy variable--simply, it stands for lots of other things. It often signifies--is highly correlated with--cultural beliefs, national and personal history, parenting styles, diet, dress, personality characteristics, standard of living, interaction with medicine, etc. It's like phone and motor vehicle ownership in 1936--it didn't mean much on its own, but it was a serious proxy for socioeconomic status and political orientation. Once you realize that race as we typically define it is pretty much just a proxy, a lot of what it tells you makes a lot more sense. One of the things that makes race look pretty legit as a biological construct is the consistent finding that different races seem to metabolize a lot of drugs fairly differently. Well, guess what--pull back that curtain and you see that something very different is going on. Here's a quote from one of my favorite pieces of literature (Chaudry, Neelam, Duddu, & Husain, 2008) from my graduate education thus far: Diet has been found to alter the pharmacokinetic properties of drugs. Since dietary habits tend to differ across ethnic groups, it could potentially exert significant effects on the response to various psy- chotropic medications. It was shown that a steady diet consisting of charbroiled beef could reduce peak phenacetin plasma levels by 78% (Conney et al., 1976). Grapefruit juice has been found to inhibit CYPIA2 and CYP3A4, with resultant increase in the blood levels of substrates of these enzymes, for example, nefazodone and buspirone (Lilja et al., 1998). A diet rich in cruciferous vegetables (such as a cabbage, broccoli and brussels sprouts) and aromatic hydrocarbons has been found to induce the activity of CYPIA2 by indole-3- carbinol, thus reducing the blood levels of many antidepressants and neuroleptics (Jefferson, 1998). It has also been noted that a diet rich in carbohydrates inhibits the activity of CYP 1A2, whereas a protein- rich diet stimulates the same. The latter probably explains why south Asians living in Asia had slower metabolism of CYP 1A2 substrates than those living in the UK who had adapted to a protein-rich diet (Alvares et al., 1976). Pretty nuts, eh? It's mostly diet and other lifestyle factors. Kind of a clarion call to make sure you don't test your new drugs on a bunch of white guys. Anyway, I could go on and on, but I think that more or less gets my point across. Race, as I'm personally fond of saying about so many things in the social sciences, is a little more real than a unicorn, and a little less real than a duck.

NI, I'll take your gracious concession, and I'll make a few gracious concessions of my own: You bring up a good point--as you've brought up in some form several times, with this: In my psychopathology class--a course that pretty much everybody in clinical psychology endures the first semester of graduate school--my professor was one day discussing various theories on the etiology of some particular mental illness I can't remember. Some theories we chuckled at far more than others. He noted with some vexation that, well, "that's the thing about these theories. They don't seem to ever just go away!" Even though the bulk of the field doesn't take them seriously, they somehow linger on longer than they should. As much as I'll make the case that psychology is scientific, that the majority of us are employing testable, falsifiable, rigorous theory to our work, it also seems that every bit of junk my discipline has ever believed is still believed by at least some small group in the profession. There are Jungians hanging around the halls of psychology in an amount--though very small--that dwarfs the number of chemists who subscribe to phlogiston theory. We don't seem to be able to trash the junk as completely as other sciences can, and do. There are a couple of things to be said about this--some kind to my discipline, some not... 1) Give us time! We're a young science. You can date psychology/psychiatry pretty much from Charcot's establishment of "hysteria" as a mental illness in the middle-to-late 19th century. Psychotherapy as we know it began with Freud, a little over a hundred years ago. I might say that other sciences take a while to figure out and solidify their big theories--it was almost a century between Kepler's laws of planetary motion described elliptical orbits and Newton's universal gravitation finally explained them. Wholesale acceptance of this new astronomical system didn't occur overnight. Even widespread acceptance of evolution by natural selection didn't just smack the natural sciences in the face immediately after Origin of Species, and why start there, anyway? Chuck's grandpa, Erasmus Darwin was talking about evolution in the late 18th century--there had been a rising scientific debate about the common descent of animals for a century by the time the big book we all know was published. 2) Give us a break! Human behavior is maddeningly complex, and human beings are superbly difficult to study in ways that rocks, heavenly bodies, finches, and nucelotide base pairs are not. These parts of nature can be interrogated directly--you stick a ruler next to them, put them on a scale, make them make a bunch of copies of themselves inside a PCR tube. The mind, on the other hand, is not measurable (though the brain is beginning to be.) We have to look at the mind's activity in this world: behavior. And even then, there only have two ways of doing that: either I have to observe it, or I have to ask people about it (this is called "self-report"). And wouldn't you know it, behavior changes when you look at it. People forget, and lie, and are biased and silly when you ask them about it. And when we circumvent all of that self-report nonsense and watch behavior, how do we make sense of it? "Does that guy look angry to you? He's tapping his foot. Is he nervous or pissed?" What I'm talking about is the need to code behavior--to operationalize a variable and then track it systematically. The complex research designs I've spent years learning about are, among other things, elaborate ways of getting around all of this insanity. These things aren't impossible to do, but they're really, really hard! Also, we're limited by technology, feasibility, and ethics in really studying psychological phenomena in the ways that would really tell us a lot. I can't forcibly separate twins at birth and assign them randomly to parents. If I could, I'd be able to tell you a hell of a lot more about this so-called "nature vs. nurture" thing. I can't follow someone around with a secret camera and watch all of their behavior 24/7. If I could, I wouldn't have to bother spending years developing reliable and valid self-report measures. Look, I know that all scientists could sit around like the Four Yorkshiremen and complain about how bad they have it. The astrophysicist might tell me that I'm lucky to have a research subject closer than a million light-years away. The evolutionary biologist would say that I'm lucky my subject hasn't been dead for fifty million years, and the biochemist might tell me that he'd love to not need a multimillion-dollar grant for equipment to examine his subject at all. All quite true. But hell, allow me a little bit of sentimentality: humans are nuts! They're unpredictable, and they do all sorts of insane things--accidentally and on purpose--when you try to study even the most basic stuff about their minds, thoughts, emotions, and behavior. The complexities of trying to investigate them with the scientific method are legion. It's doable, but it's a really crazy task. It's therefore a lot less straightforward to cart a theory out of the dumpster. There are simply more questions in this science than in others about the integrity and generalizability of research. We've got all of the standard questions, plus issues of sampling, coder bias, integrity of measures, a billion confounding variables, the meaningfulness of control and comparison groups, fair and valid operationalization of variables, the fidelity of intervention delivery and reception... I could go on. I can't show a Freudian my numbers and expect him to scratch his head and say, "well, damn--you're right." There are a thousand other questions he'll ask me first, many of which haven't yet been addressed by my empirical literature. (Nonetheless, I continue to hold that it's still science, even if results aren't as clear-cut as I'd like them to be.) 3) We can do better. We are doing better, I think--the neuroscience revolution is prompting a lot of people in my field to take a hard look at the hard-scientific rigor of their study (often because they want a piece of the sexy new neuroscience action.) The attitude of the cognitive-behaviorists over the last several decades--"hell yes you can test therapy outcomes; you can and you should!"--has broken some of the sacred bonds of the therapy room that, for much of clinical psychology's history, didn't allow in a lot of empirical investigation. Even the psychodynamic folks--whom I regard as fairly goofy anyway--want their own outcome studies now. The difficulty seems to be that, since a lot of the earlier theories frequently lack scientific rigor and falsifiability, how are we supposed to definitively prove them wrong? I don't think I can conclusively show a Freudian that classical Freudian psychodynamic theory is wrong any more than I can really "disprove" Christianity to a priest. Because they're both religions. Nonetheless, my discipline, and the professional guilds which oversee it--the APA in particular--may be lacking in a few things. As I said in my first post on this thread: there are plenty of people in psychology who need to be thrown off the boat. They don't do science, they aren't interested in science, and they don't deserve the title. I'm not alone in believing this. There is a parallel organization called the APS which tends to stick more rigorously to these values--although their own historical information wouldn't let you know this, the organization was largely founded by people who were disgusted at the APA's unwillingness to enforce more scientific standards, and jumped ship. I could sit around and debate all day about whether it'd be more useful to form another club or advocate from within, the bottom line is that standards need to get better. Some of that push can and should come from inside the discipline. It enrages most of us to no end that Dr. Phil is allowed to present himself as some sort of mental health professional, and calls himself a psychologist just like I will. But then again, hey, Deepak Chopra's a "doctor," right? So, there are my defenses and my concessions. Again, I was happy to have had the debate. Hopefully it has informed some others, or piqued some others' interest as well. At this point, I'll say: whoever you are out there, if you want to chime in now, chime in!

Hey Camper: I've not come across this personally, and it's difficult to really get a sense of what's going on just reading a text description of it and not viewing the behavior itself. To me, it sounds like we're seeing a kid that's giddy with play and is playing a game--"hey, catch me!" Both of the instances you describe take place in the context of a park playground, which is less worrisome than if you'd have observed it in a variety of different settings. Usually, while kids of this age are certainly clumsy and accident-prone, they don't do things that would clearly and obviously bring harm to themselves. Kids as young as six months old will refuse to walk off a cliff, even if mom is beckoning them to do so. If a child is not being cautious in even the basic way we'd expect at a developmental stage that they're at (which is, mind you, nowhere near the caution and carefulness of adulthood or even later childhood) it certainly can be part of an array of developmental problems. However, those problems would almost certainly be showing up in other--indeed, more obvious--ways. It's very likely that other developmental milestones (walking, talking, potty training, sociality of various kinds) would not be being met on time. So, bottom line--it's a guess at a distance, of course--is that any serious problems would manifest themselves in other ways that you'd have also mentioned. (This is just going off of the way your story seemed when I read it--there may be things you left out.) The behavior seems to be limited, not terribly unusual, and not extraordinary dangerous, given what 4-year-olds do. Because development at this age is so rapid, you can observe children do and say all sorts of goofy things, and then very quickly grow out of the behavior. You may remember your own child or children doing things in toddlerhood/early childhood that, while different than this, may have seemed equally as silly. That said, if you think it's part of a larger pattern of other behaviors that also warrant concern, have her mom run it by a pediatrician--that's the place you want to start for absolutely any concern you'd have. The first step, though, would be sharing your observations with mom! Maybe she's seen something like it; maybe she hasn't--either way, there's no reason not to let her know.

It's not really difficult to imagine. Picture a thousand people flipping coins ten times. Some of those people are going to exceed what would look like chance--by chance. Several people are going to flip 8 or 9 heads. Keep testing them, however, and they'll generally "regress to the mean." Often, even dip below what would be mean performance. It's not terribly complicated stats. Additionally, this: is to be expected as well.

Random, from such a distance, your situation is impossible to make anything but the most general comments on. Your physician may be correct that the damage is permanent, but a psychologist may be able to: 1) evaluate you and locate specific kinds of cognitive deficits 2) advise you on interventions or workarounds for those specific deficits. In other words, questions like: are very answerable. We understand a reasonable amount about the constellation of cognitive abilities and how to address issues with them specifically. Often, there are things you can do about a problem, even if an insult to the brain tissue is permanent. I wrote a very large post about IQ testing in a past thread here and explained furthermore in the same thread why you won't find anything useful online. Don't waste your time on online tests; they will tell you nothing which is clinically relevant. Depending on your insurance, a referral from your physician may or may not help in getting coverage for testing services from a psychologist. If not, you can expect to be looking at a couple of hundred bucks. From the few things you've noted about your situation, though, testing seems to me to be more than warranted. We're not just talking about any old clinical psychologist, here. While many clinical psychologists offer testing services which can be useful to a number of populations, you'll likely want a neuropsychologist, who has even more extensive training relevant to the source of your difficulties (namely, a physical head injury). Look for a neuropsychologist who does cognitive testing and/or other assessments.

If you're looking for the most extreme environment-tolerating creature that's still a member of the Kingdom Animalia, the lowly water bear may be where to look. These things would survive a planetary catastrophe that would, so to speak, take even the cockroaches with us.

Although many things that are true are beautiful, I'm not sure if we should decide what gets the "science" stamp and what doesn't based on what pleases us aesthetically. Well, I can honestly say that I don't believe that you're saying that. Believe me, I take no offense or affront at your views about my discipline. I have the same disgust with ridiculous therapies and assessments which I think lack empirical support--like the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator that you mentioned, which to me has all of the clinical/scientific utility of the parlor game that it is. But, at least for myself, I wouldn't call that "prejudice"--my regard for these things is informed by the empirical findings relevant to them, or lack thereof. Is this really a fair way to define a discipline as a science? Its success rate in sweeping the junk science that would claim that discipline as its support into some dustbin? But even taking as settled for the moment, look--they are swept into the dustbin. You'll find about as many academic psychologists who believe in, say, past-life regression therapy or "rebirthing" interventions as you do physicists who are working diligently on cold fusion. These things are discredited and laughed at in my discipline. Are we expected to police the thousands of hucksters who co-opt the language of our science in order to support those fantasies? There are plenty of people who call themselves physicists, use the language of physics--maybe even have degrees--and promote unsubstantiated, unscientific madness. Physics does not become "not a science" because "real" physicists don't bother to hunt them down and censor them. I appreciate that you're not saying that they don't work--it wouldn't matter if you were, since they, of course, do. But I just named a bunch of attributes that can be measured quantitatively in my discussion of randomized controlled trials. Are you here contending that "the proportion of individuals completing this course of therapy who go on to commit suicide" is not a quantitative measure? It may not be a "hard," physical property of the universe like mass, but that doesn't mean it is not measured quantitatively. The quantitative statistical methods we use to examine variables like that are not really often very different than what is used in, say, biochemistry. I just told you what the massive theory was! Cognitive-behaviorism! And its validity is determined by its exclusive use by every single member of a discipline? Since when is that how we decide whether or not a theory is valid? I thought we used a logico-deductive reasoning process to do that? Cognitive-behaviorism is a gigantic theory that informs tons of what psychologists study and do, and it is falsifiable. Much of the junk psychology that I don't believe in and almost no academic psychologists take seriously is often not falsifiable. That's why it's junk. Why does the presence of that junk bear on the scientific nature of the parts of psychology that are done seriously, rigorously, according to the scientific method? Look, it's not possible for an astrophysicist to show that the egg-laying space unicorn theory of stellar formation is false, either. That doesn't make astrophysics "not a science." The presence of a billion people calling themselves astrophysicists and preaching the egg-laying space unicorn theory of stellar formation wouldn't make astrophysics "not a science" either. In my last post, I described, as an example, the process of creating randomized controlled trials to test theoretical assumptions of cognitive-behaviorism. I provided quite a few details of how that process worked and what it tends to find, and asked a big question: I'm still unclear on your response to that precise question. If the people creating these trials aren't doing science, what exactly are they doing?

As the two other people who have posted have already done a pretty good job of showing: Stradi, your familiarity with modern psychological science and practice is hovering near zero. Perhaps psychodynamic theory shows up in self-help books you've read, or perhaps introductory psychology classes you've taken. Or perhaps you're just quoting much of this, without much understanding of context, from Russ Kick's modern paranoid masterpiece, "50 Things You're Not Supposed to Know, vol. 2". When we remove the insane conspiracy theories, most of us understand that Freud was not a "liar" and "fraud," but a decent social commentator who nonetheless made a lot of unwarranted generalizations about the human condition, and created a system of psychotherapy which we today typically regard as sort of a waste of time. I'm going to quote myself from a thread I commented on weeks ago. This is the second time I've dragged this quote out, and I'm beginning to realize it won't be the last: Guess what? The science and practice have, in large part, moved on. Please update yourself on the state of that science and practice, so you can write more relevant and well-informed screeds. (Or, if not outright screeds, your more usual M.O.: massively long quotes harvested from other sources which seem to strongly imply that psychology/psychiatry is bogus in general.)

Thanks for your response, NI. Let me see if I understand some things right, and hopefully get some things clarified if I don't. Why, that's quite alright. Let's agree to never let a reasonable discussion impinge upon our sense of drama, eh? It seems like you've defined science as pretty much exclusively consisting of what we might call a top-down process: a theory creates hypotheses or predictions, which you then design tests for, which provide data to either confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis, thus either lending weight to the theory or calling it into question. That seems to me to be a perfectly conventional way to test a theory, but not exhaustively descriptive of the scientific method or the scientific process. What about findings that are very much bottom-up? When Hubble first realized that everything was looking a bit reddish, and all of those galaxies were flying away from one another, was he attempting to find support for his theory that the universe began with an enormous expansion event 13.8 billion years ago? I don't think that he was. When John Snow realized that all of those poor cholera victims were getting their water from the same pump on Broad Street, was he trying to find empirical support for the germ theory of illness? No--he was a skeptic of miasma theory and had the good sense to draw a map. While certain parts of the model of hypothetico-deductive reasoning typically occur in order--you form a hypothesis, you design a test, you gather the data and see if they support it--the placement of the theory has, I think, much less of a proscribed placement. I think that all sciences reason in both directions. Sometimes, amazing results come from studies which are trying to confirm a theory. Sometimes, theories are born and adjusted based on results that don't make sense, or on basic science which may be only loosely informed by theories. For the purposes of the discussion, I'll take this as settled. I think plenty of forum members may disagree--particularly with the way that you have decided whether or not certain sciences employ methods which meet your definitions of these three. I'll refrain from talking about, for instance, classical evolutionary biology, and focus on psychology, because I think what I call the science of psychology can easily meet these three criteria. With regard to your view of how psychology meets or doesn't meet these three: So, from what I understand, in your tripartite system, you believe that psychology: 2) generates hypotheses/predictions, as well as 3) makes measurements. You don't believe that it 1) has a "general theory." This is what makes it not a science. I hope I'm clear on that. Just above, I said I'd take your tripartite criteria as settled, but what I can't take as settled is what you have decided "counts" and "doesn't count" for the first criterion. You say that it psychology has a lot of "sub-theories," but needs a "general theory." Since when must a science be so unified? What exactly makes a theory "sub," and what makes a theory "general?" Do a certain percentage of scientists in a field have to agree upon it? Do a certain number of papers informed by it have to be published every year? The closest you come to answering this question is when you say that psychology lacks a theory that is "equivalent to what quantum mechanics or general relativity tells us about the world." Should I take this to mean that a theory can only be "general"--big enough to count, as it were--if it tells us a large amount of stuff about the world? Well, if that is so, how much is enough? Isn't it difficult to compare the apple of what general relatively tells us about the world to the orange of what evolution by natural selection tells us, to the banana of what I think cognitive-behavioral theory tells us about the world? Who, exactly, gets to decide? Let me give you an example of a theory that I think tells us a lot. As I said in my first post, I'm a cognitive-behaviorist--I largely subscribe to a theory relevant to the clinical practice of psychology called cognitive-behaviorism. In (very) short, the theory proffers that emotions--both negative and positive--are produced by cognitive evaluations and interpretations of events. It also describes, on several different levels, the ways that this occurs. This is a very large theory of human behavior, cognition, mental illness, and treatment. If the theory is correct, then altering those cognitions should alter the emotional experience of a person. To test something like that, we'd have to set up a study, of course. Suppose we exposed a bunch of individuals who say they are depressed or anxious to very specific interventions designed to adjust cognitions that the theory suggests might be relevant for depression or anxiety. Then, we measure outcomes--not only by just asking them, but by physiological measures of anxiety, by physiological indices known to be associated with depressed mood, and by yet more objective outcome indicators like suicide rates, occupational success, physical health, academic achievement, admissions to hospitals. And what if those things generally turn out better after the treatment? Not perfect, mind you, but a lot better? Of course, that doesn't confirm our theory yet--we are skeptical, and constantly fret that a million other things might be going on. What if it's just the placebo effect of therapy rather than our fancy interventions--the mere fact that they're sitting and talking to somebody an hour or two a week? Good question. We'll create a placebo group that essentially gets supportive counseling (e.g., "hang in there, buddy.") What if the people who seek this out are weird, somehow--predisposed to do better, because those destined to recover well are the sort who're also interested in this sort of thing? Then we'll not assign them randomly to treatment or control groups, we'll do comprehensive checks of their demographic characteristics to see if they're different from the normal population. What if it only works for certain disorders? That'd certainly be a hole in a theory that seeks to explain the relationship between cognitions and emotions in general. Then I guess we'd better start checking them all. And when we do, what do we find? Well, it still works. Not only does it work, it works as well or better than medication, a finding seen over and over again for the last twenty years, thirty years or more. What I'm describing is the process of designing gold standard measures of therapeutic outcome, called randomized controlled trials. The hypotheses of these trials are informed by a massive theory which seeks to explain a large chunk of human experience. We think that it does indeed explain that chunk because of what our data seem to tell us. If you're curious about it, just Google randomized controlled trials for cognitive behavioral therapy, and check it out. I understand that a lot of people may not realize that this is what many academic and practicing psychologists do with their time. This is the way that good practice is developed. What about this process doesn't sound like it's informed by theory? What about this doesn't sound like science? I await your response.

We can't manipulate anything "at the cellular level?" Care to clarify that one?

So, reading another thread last evening I came upon a post by our forum member needimprovement which contained the following. Go ahead and read it carefully, if you will: I wanted to talk about it, but I didn't want to take the topic of that thread too far afield. I messaged needimprovement about it, and he graciously agreed to discuss it in another post I'd here create, starting with the quote itself. The idea is that needimprovement will post below to expand on and clarify his thoughts--specifically, regarding psychology not being a science (though he may need to speak more broadly to make his points). Let me say a couple of things first--all or some of which may already be obvious to the screaming fans who already follow my every post: 1) As a doctoral student in clinical psychology, I find myself firmly on the other side. Psychological science is what I love, and what I would say I do all day. 2) As a cognitive-behaviorist, I also tend to agree with at least the spirit of the contention: "psychoanalysis is about on par with witchcraft." I don't tend to think of them as part of psychological science, so let's keep them out of it. 3) As a supporter of the movement within clinical psychology towards empirically supported treatments, I am by no means eager to defend clinical psychology's less scientific quarters (see point #2). I will be the first to admit that there are academics and practitioners in my field who don't think scientifically, don't do what I'd call quality science, or just aren't interested in it as a science. We have a lot of growing up to do as a professional guild--there are plenty of people who need to be thrown off the boat. Nonetheless, I don't think this embarrassing segment of the field makes psychology "not a science" any more than quack doctors call into question the idea of scientific medicine. 4) As somebody who has invested thousands of hours into something he calls a science, derives a lot of value and esteem from, and wishes to be his career, bias is unavoidable. I'm going to make a strong statement about it, directed towards needimprovement specifically: it is nearly impossible that I'll change my mind. This is bias at its highest level; I simply won't be open to a thundering and inviolable proof that psychology isn't a science as a layperson might be. This is called cognitive dissonance, and it's the same reason you won't generally convince a frat initiate that fraternities are a dumb idea--he just spent weeks getting paddled mercilessly and running naked around campus to join one. Needimprovement therefore is taking on the honorable task of debating someone who almost certainly will not concede. He is therefore free to regard any of my claimed victories as merely bias or close-mindedness on my part. For people who are reading this, on either "side" of the "debate," or not on a side at all: if you would, I'd ask you to let myself and needimprovement to go at it for a couple of rounds before you begin posting on the thread. Let us have, say, five back-and-forths. Let the two of us get the ground of the debate established, and then have the peanut gallery join in if it wishes. Until then, make like a tennis audience, yeah? So, needimprovement, my brave and worthy opponent, en garde! If you'd like to expand on and explain your quote above, sir, then I happily say: the floor is yours. What is a science?

I think there may be more rigorous, more testable, and more validated theory behind it than people think. Also, I think it's plenty interesting.

Random, try Googling "29 27 30 22 5 10 20 3 24 9 19 15 25 1 1 4 9 8 12" Put it within quotation marks, just like I did. And on another issue, please do post your theory of Hyper Adaptive Evolution. So what if it falls on deaf ears? It's your theory--doesn't attempting to defend it against somebody who doesn't understand it make it and you stronger? The worst that can happen is somebody changes your mind about something--and that's not a bad thing.

I did once hear this in a physics class, along with the somewhat similar--and even more amusing--"On a large enough timescale, eventually, all of the air molecules in the room will suddenly bounce <pointing towards corner> that way, and we'll all suffocate."

The refutations of the cosmological argument are easy enough to make their way into intro philosophy classes. In a hierarchy of Aristotle's bright ideas, it ranks somewhere between "the brain is a cooling organ" and "women have fewer teeth than men."